The follow-the-money approach to piracy has gained traction in recent months and efforts are already underway to cut the flow of advertising revenue to non-licensed music and movie sites.

Emphasis has been placed on embarrassing big brands by pointing out when their ads appear on sites deemed unacceptable to the music industry. That strategy has been helped along by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, who were also present at last night’s event.

Musically has a very lengthy but excellent report on the overall debate but perhaps of most interest to our readers is the how comments from Theo Bertram, UK policy manager at Google, appear to clarify the company’s stance on the piracy issue. Google will do their part, but won’t take on responsibility for work that should be carried out by other companies.

First, Google’s attention was drawn to its search results, with complaints from musician David Lowery that a search for Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ (call me maybe download) conjured up a list of unlicensed sites, some of which have (or used to have) an advertising relationship with Google.

ITunes failed to appear in a prominent position in the results which begs an important question that doesn’t appear to have been discussed. Why can’t Apple, the most successful and cash-rich digital music product company in the world, achieve a better search engine placement than a low budget MP3 search engine that hardly anyone has heard of? Google’s fault? That seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, Geoff Taylor of the BPI said that Google has the both the information and technological ability to make that happen.

“[Google] know very well what sites are illegal, because we send them notices, a million a week, yet coming on to search, very often those sites appear at the top of search results,” he said.

From here it’s interesting to see how the conversation develops. Google clearly accepts that it has a part to play in solving the problem but understands better than anyone else that interfering with search results, especially on the basis of a loose assessment on which sites may or may not be infringing on someone else’s rights, is a tricky game. After all, if DMCA notices sent to Google were the definitive barometer of illegality, Google itself would be the most illegal site in the world.

“I am an optimist, in that search will get better, and be able to serve people with the results exactly that they want, and to do so utterly lawfully as well,” said Bertram. Google’s policy manager later added in a Q&A that basic search results for an artist were turning up fewer pirate sites after the company adjusted its algorithm last year, but conceded that when people were more specific by adding “download MP3″, Google aren’t so good on the downgrades.

“I know the complexities can be seen as something to hide behind. It is easier to tell whether something is pornography than whether something is licensed or not. The legal basis for declaring a whole site unlawful in the UK at least still only applies to a relatively small handful of websites.”

Perhaps understandably this was a red line for the BPI’s Geoff Taylor, who pointed out that The Pirate Bay and sites such as KickAssTorrents and H33T have already been deemed illegal by the UK High Court yet Google still indexes them. Bertram defended, saying that when users click the results they discover the sites are blocked by court order, something which he feels is useful for them to see.

“Blocking websites, I don’t think is as effective as going after them as a business,” he said, using the now-defunct Megaupload as an example.

“The supply that was going to Megaupload had simply shifted to a whole new range of middle-ranking pirate sites. My worry is if we’re going after them one at a time with blocking, you start getting into the whac-a-mole thing.”

While the recording and movie industries are clearly pro-blocking, Google believes the issue can be dealt with by starving pirate sites of advertising revenue, something that should be handled by the advertisers themselves. All they have to do is provide a list of sites where ads shouldn’t appear.

“It’s not Google’s job to go around the web to declare whether sites are legal or illegal, but if Coca-Cola comes to us and says here’s a list of 500 dynamic sites and we don’t want you to place ads on those, that’s a slightly different thing. It’s almost a marketing thing for the brand,” he said.

Bertram also noted Google’s stance should it become aware that it had served ads to sites promoting infringing content.

“You have an obligation to take [the ads] down. We’re doing that at record levels, but we know we need to do more,” he said, adding that if only “dodgy brands and dodgy agencies” are left working with “dodgy sites”, enough will have been done to ensure that piracy is no longer a profitable business.

The theory is that if the money is taken away, piracy will no longer flourish. It’s an interesting assertion that will definitely hold true for some file-sharing sites. However, for the majority of people providing the actual content – the guy in the street who wants to share – the approach will need some tuning since he’s already making no money. Bringing those guys together without a middle-man might be the next logical file-sharing evolution, if advertising in the traditional sense becomes non-viable.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

To this end it’s common to publicly highlight the fact that U.S. companies are targeting potential customers on sites deemed offensive by the entertainment industries in the hope that their respective branding departments will feel nervous that continued exposure will cause damage to their image.

In advancement of this name-and-shame philosophy, since the start of the year the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California has produced a monthly report aiming to identify the online ad networks and companies offering the most support to “major illicit file sharing sites around the world.”

The third installment for March 2013 delivers more of the same. The University researchers say they have monitored the top 500 URLs receiving the most DMCA takedown notices as listed in Google’s Transparency Report and from that worked out which ad networks give the most support to “pirate” sites.

The technique is problematic, mainly due to the fact that just because a site receives a DMCA notice it doesn’t necessarily follow that they have refused to comply and therefore in non-compliance. Plus, these are notices sent to Google, not the sites themselves.

Of all companies online, Google receives the most DMCA notices to the tune of several million per week, but they aren’t considered a “pirate site” and rightly so. From the report there is no indication that the USC researchers have considered whether the sites in the top 500 are compliant or not.

Ad Networks criticized

The ad networks topping the charts this month are:

1. Propellerads
2. Exoclick
3. Infolinks
4. Adcash
5. Admxr
6. Adsrevenue (New entry)
7. Yahoo/Right Media
8. Adserver (New entry)
9. Trix.net (New entry)
10. Sumotorrent

Google (Doubleclick) were present in the January report but have not appeared since. The same applies to Quantcast but for different reasons. USC appear to have retrospectively modified both of their previously issued reports when discussions with Quancast revealed the ad network had been included in error (they weren’t serving ads in many cases).

“In late February we have had productive talks with Quantcast about our January and February Ad Reports,” USC write. “We now believe that Quantcast was incorrectly identified as being among the top ten Ad Networks placing ads on infringing piracy sites.”

It’s also worth noting that SumoTorrent, which has appeared in previous USC reports but this month at its lowest position yet, is listed as a large advertising network in its own right. It isn’t. SumoTorrent uses ads from other providers and serves them only on its own sites, SumoTorrent and Seedpeer.

Furthermore, some very basic clickstream analysis reveals several ad networks successfully funding some of the biggest file-sharing sites warrants not a single mention anywhere in USC’s report, which raises serious questions about the validity of the techniques being used.

Brands said to be reporting “pirate sites”.

While noting that they may not have deliberately placed their ads on the sites in question, Annenberg Innovation Lab still lists many large brands who they claim are providing advertising revenue to sites that have received a lot of DMCA takedown notices.

There are some huge names, not least government related departments including the U.S. Army and National Guard.

From the world of fashion we see Adidas and Gucci. In the online and computing realm we see Amazon, Ancestry.com. AT&T, Bing, Google Play, HP, Verizon, World of Warcraft, Windows 8 and Xfinity. Motoring related brands include Firestone, Ford, Honda, Lexus, Lincoln, Mazda, Mini Cooper, Toyota. Sundry others include American Express, IKEA, Pizza Hut and Target.

Finally, and quite unusually, the report takes a shot at this week’s Times Square advertising campaign by the band Ghost Beach.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, band frontman Josh Ocean explained that they hoped the campaign would “..open a discussion up with our peers about how they felt about music distribution on the internet and the future of the industry,” but the USC researchers frame things differently.

They are suggesting a contrast between what the band are really trying to do versus the actions of a company that took efforts to end associations with piracy earlier this year.

“Whether this is just a publicity stunt or a real counter trend, we can’t help but contrast this to the moves of Levi Strauss to make sure its ads did not appear on pirate sites,” the researchers write.

While Levi Strauss did indeed withdraw advertising from certain sites in January, as far as we know Ghost Beach have never advertised on a ‘pirate site’ but in fact have spent significant amounts of money through their licensing deal with American Eagle to place advertising for their own product with a completely legitimate agency. Why this latest campaign is even mentioned in the report seems to defy reason.

Moving forward, if this research by USC is to maintain credibility next month and beyond it will need to consider its methodology and accusations more carefully.

While there is undoubtedly plenty of sites in the top 500 domains in Google’s Transparency report that are not DMCA compliant, there will be many that are. Simply looking at DMCA notices sent to Google and from that concluding that the sites they concern aren’t compliant is seriously flawed.

For example, RapidShare – a company that has made huge efforts to disassociate itself with piracy in recent years – is in the top 50 sites as listed by Google’s Transparency Report. Is this company not allowed to make a living through advertising anymore, even though it is DMCA compliant?

If it is to remain neutral, USC needs to look at DMCA notices sent to the sites themselves (or obtain data on the same) and then measure how many of those are being ignored before it can start judging what is and what isn’t a “pirate site”.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There are many ways that sites can generate revenue in order to keep going, but far and away the most obvious is by the placement of advertising. Most public facing sites carry adverts of some kind and it is the goal of entities such as the MPAA and RIAA to have these removed, either by placing direct pressure on advertisers themselves or through the agencies that handle them.

It will come as no surprise that due to them operating some of the Internet’s largest ad networks, search engines are high on the list for berating.

The latest pressure comes via new study carried out by the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Released today, the report aims to identify the online ad networks offering the most support to the “major pirate movie and music sites around the world.”

The top 10 list produced by USC notably features Google in the number two position and Yahoo at number six. Topping the chart is OpenX, a Pasadena company described by CrunchBase as “one of the world’s leading providers of digital and mobile advertising technology.” Web analytics and advertising company Quancast appears at position seven.

In order to compile the list of piracy-related sites, USC mined Google’s own Transparency Report for the sites that received the most DMCA takedown notices during the previous month.

In third position on Google’s report for most takedown requests is SumoTorrent. This torrent index also features at position four in USC’s report, with the university claiming that the site operates its own advertising network.

USC’s full list appears as follows:

1. Openx
2. Google (including Double Click)
3. Exoclick
4. Sumotorrent
5. Propellerads
6. Yahoo (including Right Media)
7. Quantcast
8. Media Shakers
9. Yesads
10. Infolinks

The university says that it used a bot to scrape Ad Network HTML identifiers from each ad in order to identify the advertising network responsible for its placement. Speaking with CNET, Google suggested the methodology might be flawed.

“The complexity of online advertising has led some to conclude incorrectly that the mere presence of any Google code on a site means financial support from Google,” the company said.

The report, which notes that it will continue to list the “top advertising offenders” on a monthly basis, states that major brands are not aware that their money is being spent financing the “piracy industry”.

USC says the aim of the report is to help these innocent companies “steer their ad dollars away from sites that exploit film, TV and music artists for what appears to be criminal gain.”

“Whenever we talk to a brand about the fact that their ads are all over the pirate sites, they’re like, ‘Oh, how did that happen?’” said Jonathan Taplin, Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab. “We thought it would be easier if they knew what ad networks were putting ads on pirate sites — so they could avoid them.”

“We do not believe that government regulation alone is the answer to the Piracy problem, but rather that the self-regulation of major sectors like the online advertising industry could make it harder for the Kim Dotcom`s of the world to unfairly exploit artists,” Taplin continued. “We look forward to working with advertising agencies and networks in the coming months to address this issue.”

The report can be downloaded here (pdf).

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.